grad school achebe

After a brief hiatus, Gerry and Aaron are back, talking Mother Night with Matthew Cheney, Assistant Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University and author of Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form and Blood: Stories! We are what we pretend to podcast, so we must be careful what we pretend to podcast...

Gerry and Aaron tackle Vonnegut's 1971 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June in their most dramatic episode ever! Come for the Theatre of the Absurd, stay for snippets from Aaron's dissertation on American fantasies of Africa...

This week, on Grad School Vonnegut: After Dark, Aaron and Gerry talk Deadeye Dick with Bee Gabriel! Check out Bee's Twitter! Check out their Patreon! Sorry about the audio in just a few places; we were working with a truly messed-up record on one of the tracks and did our best...

Gerry and Aaron discuss 1979's Jailbird! Labor, prison, massacres, communism, Reagan, Watergate, finance, Einstein, Jimmy Carter, Judas Iscariot, and Kilgore Trout, too...

This week Aaron and Gerry talk about 1963's Cat's Cradle with Patrick Iber, historian of 20th century Latin America and U.S. foreign relation and author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America! Let this be your vin-dit! Busy, busy, busy...

This week Gerry and Aaron talk to Adam Kotsko (author of the Awkwardness trilogy, The Prince of This World, and Neoliberalism's Demons) about Vonnegut's first published story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (1950). We also talk quite a bit about Watchmen, including spoilers for the 2019-2020 HBO sequel series.

This week Aaron and Gerry talk Breakfast of Champions with Robert T. Tally, Jr., author of Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography, which you should read!

Too hot for Apple Podcasts, it's "The Big Space ****"! This week Gerry and Aaron are talking about Vonnegut's nihilistically obscene, obscenely nihilistic contribution to Harlan Ellison's New Wave SF anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). You can read the story here: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/big-space-fuck-kurt-vonnegut/

This week Aaron and Gerry talk to Rebekah Sheldon of Indiana University and the author of The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe about The Sirens of Titan (1959)!

This week Gerry and Aaron discuss Bluebeard (1987) with Susan Farrell, a professor in the English department at the College of Charleston and one of the founders of the international Kurt Vonnegut Society.